You must all kiss Hank's ass.

This is one of the better writings I've seen in a while: http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php

Ole Eichhorn had a mention of skeuomorphs: "A skeuomorph is a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time."

This is a really interesting concept, so I jumped over to Matt Webb's Interconnected blog. I read his entry on skeuomorphs, which talks about fake/gas fireplaces that are made to look like they are logs. Very well written, and I immediately subscribed. Looks like just the sort of topics that I would like to read and think about. Go check him out.

Well, I went and took the BBC's “What Am I Like?“ personality test, and it turns out that I'm a Strategist.

Yeah, it is eerily on the mark. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

Strategists are generally easy-going. They are intellectually curious and enjoy abstract ideas. Sometimes they like thinking of a solution to a problem more than taking practical steps to solve it.

May be impractical, forgetting practical issues, such as paying bills or doing the shopping

[via Alan Francis]

Mike Pope is on vacation, back to his roots in Denver, as he's been blogging about it. My favorite quote, so far, as it is something I really can relate to:

Some people, when traveling, go shopping for local crafts, others visit historic sites. Me, I visit bookstores. This is absurd, since books are books, and I need more books about as much as I need more debt, but I find the ambiance of a good bookstore irresistible. The Tattered Cover has small floor space, so they expand upward for a total of four floors, I think is. They have claustrophobically high shelves, not my favorite arrangement, but somehow I managed to find 4 or 5 books that I probably could have gotten at home, too, but ... oh well.

I know that more than once, Mary's thought it weird that I want to go to a bookstore when we are travelling somewhere.

It is a good read about Mike's journey back to Denver for a reunion, as I get some of the same feelings when I head back to Seattle (where I grew up) from Cleveland (where I live now).

Scott Hanselman has a great explanation of diabetes using an airplane analogy. Great.

The Polystyrene Packaging Council Website seems to be saying that styrofoam isn't the evil bringer of doom that people think it is. Here's a page of fun facts about styrofoam, including the following:

All polystyrene packaging comprises only a tiny fraction of the material that goes into our landfills. In fact, less than one percent by weight of the total municipal solid waste disposed is polystyrene. Paper and paperboard products make up the largest category of material (about 31 percent) disposed in our landfills.

and

No chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are used in the manufacture of any polystyrene foam packaging products in the United States and have not been since 1990.

”To defend, you must have some idea of what you're defending, and who and what you're defending against, specifically, which attacks.  Failure do understand and know these things means that your defense will most likely not be effective, and could in fact decrease your security.“ - Michael Giagnocavo

Thus starts an interesting series on cracking code. Check it out if you are interested in the mindset it takes to be a cracker.

[via Scoble]

Well, Orkut seems to be catching on, and I'm starting to get interested in it. I haven't really looked too much into it, but it seems like a start towards a more networked, social web. You have to be invited to join by someone who is already in it, which is an interesting concept. Since people like Scoble are in it, you can be sure that the number of members is skyrocketing. I'm waiting for an invite from someone, so I can see just what it is about.

It reminds me a bit of one of the older ones that played off of the whole six degrees of separation concept. I seem to recall it being called sixdegrees.com, or something. Basically, you entered all your friends in there, and they were supposed to join. Then, they would enter all their friends, who would join, then enter all their friends, who would join, etc. and on to everyone in the world. You would log on to the system, and it would report for you who all was online at the same time from your group of friends, or from your extended group of contacts. I actually met a couple people who happened to be two or three levels from me. I kept in touch with them for a while, but eventually lost touch with them.

When I sit around, gazing at the activity on my site, all of the people searching for “celebrity plastic surgery” or “surgery for celebrities” on google or yahoo seem to come here, I am sometimes amazed by the wide diversity of User Agents that people have.

For those not hip to the HTTP lingo, a “User Agent” is a little bit of text that gets sent along with your request for a web page. When you visit a website, the server logs information about you, including your “User Agent” string. Generally, it has the browser that you are using and the version information. There are really a lot of browsers out there, even though we only really hear about Internet Explorer (and Netscape (and Opera)). In fact, here is my current User Agents list for today (yup, just today): (WARNING: This list is long, so when you get bored, scroll down further)

User Agents	Hits
Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.htm)	28
Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 Dead Link Checker (wn.zyborg@looksmart.net; ht...	28
SharpReader/0.9.3.2 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.573; WinNT 5.0.2195.0)	19
SharpReader/0.9.4.0 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.510; WinNT 5.1.2600.0)	17
NewsGator/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; Microsoft Windows NT 5.1.2600.0; .NET C...	17
Waypath Scout v2.1 - info at waypath dot com	14
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slu...	13
SharpReader/0.9.3.1 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.573; WinNT 5.1.2600.0)	13
RssBandit/1.2.0.90 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.573; WinNT 5.1.2600.0; http://www.rssbandi...	9
PubSub.com RSS reader - http://www.pubsub.com/	9
Java/1.4.1_05	9
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; www.coreyhaines.com; Crazy Br...	9
SharpReader/0.9.3.2 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.573; WinNT 5.1.2600.0)	7
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)	6
SharpReader/0.9.4.0 (.NET CLR 1.1.4322.573; WinNT 5.1.2600.0)	6
Feedster Crawler/1.0; Feedster, LLC.	4
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)	4
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Hotbar 4.2.1.1367)	3
ping.blo.gs/1.0	3
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)	2
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; {6067C6C9-FBE7-4F28-AC15-F02F...	2
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1...	2
The World as a Blog :: http://brainoff.com/geoblog/	2
BlogShares Bot/1.02	2
libwww-perl/5.69	2
	2
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)	2
Lynx/2.8.5dev.7 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.7	2
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/124 (KHTML, like Gecko)...	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Compaq; Rogers Hi-Speed Internet)...	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; FunWebProducts)	1
Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/2.0final	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows 98)	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows 98; Compaq)	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Avant Browser [avantbrowser.c...	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.0.2; yplus 4.4.01d)	1
Frontier/9.0 (WinNT)	1
Technoratibot/0.6	1
obidos-bot (weblog bookwatch)	1
Java/1.4.2	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 1.0....	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; T312461)	1
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Rogers Hi-Speed Internet)	1

So, these little strings show up in my log, and I wonder at all the cool browsers and spiders and aggregators, etc. Now, here and there are little bits of extra information, like “FunWebProducts” and “Rogers Hi-Speed Internet.” Also, there is an entry that has “www.coreyhaines.com” which is, of course, my website. That's my browser sending that user agent. This way, when people look in their logs, they can see my website, perhaps even being curious enough to come visit (not that there is that much interesting stuff here to read).

In any case, the point of this entry is how to add your own custom information to your user agent string. Very easy to do. Since we are on windows, it is probably likely that this is a registry change. Sure enough, we will end up adding something to the registry. Don't know what the registry is? Don't fret, you can find a file to download at the end of this entry which you can use to make the changes yourself. If you want to know more, Winguides.com has a great tutorial on the registry ().

IMPORTANT WARNING AND DISCLAIMER! As always, changing the registry can be dangerous if you do not know what you are doing. Whenever you work with the registry, it is best to make a backup before you do anything. I lay no claim or responsibility if you hurt your registry. And, now, back to the story.

So, the first thing to do is to find out where Internet Explorer stores it User Agent strings. Here's the registry path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent

Underneath this, there is a “Post Platform” key. You can create strings under this key to contain any information you want. For example, I have two strings (REG_SZ), one named “Crazy Browser 1.0.5” and another named “www.coreyhaines.com.” These are custom strings that get added to your User Agent. All you have to do is create a new REG_SZ string and name it what you want. The value is irrelevant. Presto!

Don't want to manually go in and change your registry by hand? Download this file and just change the to be whatever you want. Don't forget the quotations marks!

custom_user_agent_string.reg (.28 KB)

Disclaimer: I make no guarantees about the safety of this reg file, so use it AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Could it be? A huge update to XP with Service Pack 2 to bridge the gap until Longhorn? Windows Media Player 10 along with the other Service Pack 2 stuff. Would be interesting.

The mars rover website has a great article on how the spirit landed within 200 meters of its intended landing spot. Imagine, they sent this ship 300 million miles away and got within 660 feet of the target. Crazy. Read the article, very interesting. Here's an excerpt:

All the hard work paid off January 3 when navigators hit their target at the top of the martian atmosphere to within about 200 meters (660 feet), setting a new standard for navigation accuracy for all future interplanetary missions. "The trajectory was so perfect that not only was it within 200 meters, we also didn't need to adjust course in the final eight days of cruise," said Dr. Michael Watkins, navigation and mission design manager at JPL.

So, my employer is building a new office next to my building. They started last year, so it is just now coming to the completion of the skeleton, all the beams are up. Well, now that it is completed, there is a tree and an american flag on the top of it. In true style of the company, an email was sent to the employees explaining the significance. I thought it was interesting, so, in true Corey style, I'm putting it up on my blog. Here it is:

Not only the workers got to sign their name, as the last beam was placed in the main hall of our building for all the employees to sign.